Manifest Man

THE NEW CRITIC*THIS SATURDAY, July 18th, to celebrate our readers, fellow editors, and many esteemed contributors, The New Critic will party in New York on from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m.Doors open at 8. Registration is required.A paid subscription to The New Critic is necessary to register.If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, you can become one below. For $30 a year, paid subscribers get access to Postscript, our interview series, Contra, our criticism section, and exclusive New Critic parties like July 18th’s all-night open bar.*Register now!Kit KnuppelAlex Bronzini-Vender is a 20-year-old writer from New York, NY.On a cool June evening in Berkeley, I watched a man named Victor try to shoot a beam of light out of his penis. Minutes earlier, he had raised his hand because he found the volunteer onstage before him attractive. And now here he was, facing her in front of a crowd of perhaps 60 people, having been instructed to do precisely this by a woman named Aella, a pseudonymous camgirl and self-described sex researcher. She had promised the men in the room that the exercise, if undertaken in earnest, might actually result in hookups, real ones. Now she told her first subject to imagine himself gathering all of the energy in his body into his pelvis and then sending that energy outward as a beam of light, straight through his trousers and into the room.Victor pointed out that this seemed a little absurd, which it manifestly was. But he did it anyway, standing there and trying — and you could see him trying — to imagine himself emitting light from the tip of his penis. Aella reported that Victor wasn’t shooting enough light, and he readjusted. She and the volunteer watched. The rest of us did, too. And then the volunteer delivered her verdict, which was that Victor had come up short. She had, in fact, “felt more” from him a moment earlier, before he’d begun to imagine light streaming out of his phallus.This was Manifest, and Victor’s ordeal belonged to its official programming. The conference — this was its fourth iteration — convenes each summer at Lighthaven, a verdant complex of gardens and halls in a converted Berkeley hotel that rationalists keep as a gathering place.

At Manifest, rationalism has little to do with Descartes; it’s a Bay Area subculture built around the site LessWrong, a “community blog” preoccupied with mathematics, philosophy, genetics, and the apocalyptic risks (and opportunities) presented by artificial intelligence.Around 800 people attend Manifest each year. It takes its name, and its nominal subject, from Manifold, a prediction market. At the opening assembly, Austin Chen, co-founder of Manifold, asked everyone who had ever bet on it to stand, and very nearly the whole audience got to its feet. Officially, then, this is a conference about forecasting. But “a conference about prediction markets” describes Manifest about as well as “a conference about effigies” would describe Burning Man. Prediction markets are what the attendees have in common, but they are not, mostly, what they came to discuss.Any attendee could propose a session on any topic throughout the weekend, and several hundred sessions took place over the three days, a dozen or so underway in any given hour. At one session, attendees proposed political systems that might replace representative democracy (among them “futarchy,” a governance framework in which voters set overarching goals and prediction markets determine the specific policies used to achieve them). At another, a married couple gave a practical guide to IQ-screening one’s unborn children, drawn from their own experience doing the same. At the very moment that I watched Victor try and fail to emit photons from his manhood, a few doors down, a mathematician was explaining his PhD thesis on the topology of three-dimensional shapes.Aella’s session was titled Get Hotter With Aella (Reinforcement Learning: Hot Girl Feedback). Reinforcement learning with human feedback is a technique for teaching a machine learning model to do what a human wants it to do. The model produces an output, a human rewards or penalizes it, and the cycle repeats, each round nudging the machine’s behavior closer to what the human prefers. Here, the model was Victor, and Aella, the human in the loop, was teaching him to be desired.It didn’t work. Victor left the stage no closer to seducing his woman of choice. Round after round, the men failed. Now another man, Alex, raised his hand to face a new woman, Sam, while the room looked on.

Alex’s trouble, Aella determined, was his stiffness; he was holding himself like he was bracing for a flu shot.So she set about loosening him. “Tense your abdomen,” she told him. “I want large circles.” Alex made the circles with his arms, but Sam reported that he still felt “very stiff” to her. Everything about him, Sam added, was “feeling very robotic.”Then Aella told Alex to touch Sam. “Reach out,” she said, “and touch Sam in a way that feels okay.” Alex smiled, a wide and sudden smile, and swung his arm up and over Sam’s shoulders in a single great swoop, planting his hand at the base of her neck, his face fixed in an awkward rictus.“Let’s put that hand down,” Aella said. “Now let’s try it again. Step closer.” Alex stepped closer and reached for Sam a second time. Sam reported that everything about it still felt “very robotic.”So Aella set about making Alex less robotic. She had him touch Sam “as robotically as you possibly can,” and then with as little robotness as he could manage, and then as “a robot pretending to be human,” and then as “an actual human.”“It’s interpretive inspo,” she explained to him. “Just go on vibes.” It did not help.“I feel like I’m not connecting with you at all,” Sam told Alex. “We’re looking into each other’s eyes but not seeing anything.”At this point, Aella had gone quiet. She said that looking at Alex gave her a feeling of “grief.” She asked him what he wished to do to Sam. He thought for a moment and then replied that he wished to hug her. Aella gently coached him toward telling Sam that he wanted to hug her. Finally, Alex asked for a hug. Sam declined.That the reinforcement learning didn’t take with this particular group of men was, in the end, beside the point. All ideologies rest on a theory of what humans are, or ought to be — there’s John Stuart Mill’s homo economicus, Hannah Arendt’s homo faber.

Aella’s theory of man, and Manifest’s, holds that humans, with sufficient feedback and rigor, can and should train their brains to function like computers, that we can set aside the superstitions, the insecurities, the neediness and pride, the whole tangle of stuff that makes seducing a woman by means of imagined scrotal light feel humiliating — that, with enough work, we can become homo manifesticus.“Davos man,” Samuel Huntington’s term for the world-bestriding elite of our era, takes its name from the Swiss town that plays host to the World Economic Forum’s annual summit. Davos man is staid, professional, and credentialed to the teeth. He would sooner die than be seen before a roomful of strangers imagining himself shooting light from his scrotum.Perhaps Davos man needs no instruction in seduction, or perhaps he’s just too vain to ask for it. Either way, Manifest man labors under no such reservations. He seeks to optimize every facet of his life. At Manifest, the optimizing began early: Lighthaven’s first session, on Friday afternoon, recast the basics of social interaction in financial terms.It was called “how 2 socialMax Manifest 😎,” and it was led by a 23-year-old quantitative researcher at a trading firm — let’s call him Josh. He proposed to teach the room what he called “portfolio theory applied to socializing.” As it went, friendship was a kind of trading book. Like in any trading book, one should always maximize expected value when socializing. One should not, Josh advised, “give a fuck about fairness” — that is, whether an individual reciprocates the effort you give them — because fairness is a drag on returns. According to Josh, asking someone a great many questions as you strike up a conversation is “OP” (“overpowered,” a high-return move at almost no cost).The single most overpowered move of all, though, is vulnerability. The trick, Josh explained, is to disclose something that makes you look bad, precisely when almost no one else is willing to do the same. You take the hit to your personal vanity, and the friendship deepens faster than it otherwise could. By way of example, Josh told the room about his porn habit. He was, he explained, a “gooner.”

He’d confessed as much to the last stragglers in a thinning room at a previous conference; one of them stuck around to talk to Josh, and he later gave Josh a free ticket to Manifest. Josh’s vulnerability had paid off! He recommended the strategy to the rest of us.If Davos man ever had a porn addiction, it’s unlikely that he’d ever admit it. But then, Davos man probably wouldn’t need Josh’s instruction in the first place. Socialization comes naturally to him. The relevant skills were installed early, at the right schools, among the right people, so thoroughly that he has long since forgotten they are skills at all. At Manifest, though, there is a certain existential loneliness, a specifically sexual strain of angst, that did not lift once in the three days of the conference. Multiple sessions every day centered sex, love, and romance — that is, how to master them, or merely obtain them. These neuroses practically announced themselves at the door: the first thing I saw at Lighthaven, more or less, was a whiteboard by the entrance on which someone had written, “Single? Check out FEMBOYS.”In previous years, Manifest attendees reportedly participated in orgies, the occurrence of which were later revealed to the public through prediction markets, with people betting on whether an orgy had indeed taken place during the conference. At the time of publication, though, the odds that “there is an orgy” at Manifest this year stood at five percent on Manifold. And on the conference’s final day, one Manifold user created a market on whether he would manage to make out with someone before it ended. By evening, it had resolved to “NO.”“You’re all fucking animals,” Aella offered, by way of welcome, just after noon on the second day of Manifest, “Obviously.” We’d each been assigned an animal and asked to make its sound, all 50 of us at once, as part of a group icebreaker. I was a lion.Then, under the California sun, Aella ran an experiment, the main event, in what she called “live polls.” She would name a spectrum, and we were to physically arrange ourselves along invisible axes, each of us walking to the spot that accurately represented our place on the distribution.